When you understand what your competitors are saying and doing, you become more confident in what makes your brand different and special. You get better at targeting and create more compelling messaging. An audit of your competitors’ marketing campaigns is a great place to start.

5 Steps to a Competitor Campaign Analysis

The following process will help you conduct an audit of your competitors’ marketing campaigns.

Step One: Determine Who Your Competitors Are

Spend some time brainstorming who your competitors are. Ask business executives who they consider to be your biggest competition. Look at who else is performing well in search results for your keywords. Check out tools like SEMRush and SimilarSites. Don’t be afraid to include businesses that are significantly larger or smaller than your own.

Step Two: Research Your Competitors’ Online Properties

Look at each competitor’s website and all of its social media properties.

Website

What’s being merchandised on the homepage?

Are there any products, categories, or themes that are getting special attention?

What categories or themes is the blog focused on lately?

Are there any weekly or on-going post themes?

Does it explicitly mention any campaigns or contests?

Do any specific bloggers or influencers get mentioned on the blog?

Social Media Profiles

Is the competitor using any hashtags that indicate an organized campaign?

Are there themes that stretch across platforms, like Twitter and Instagram?

Has the competitor shared any specific content they’ve created?

Are there any topics mentioned frequently?

Does the competitor regularly point to specific bloggers or websites?

Is there any unique content (like videos or photography) hosted on the social media platforms?

Step Three: Research Your Competitors on External Sites

A backlink analysis (using tools like Ahrefs or OSE) is a great place to start, but results can be muddied if one of your competitors is a megasite like Amazon or Target. In those cases, consider looking only at relevant subdomains or categories. (E.g., If I’m a local garden center competing with a huge brand like Home Depot, I’d pay attention to the backlinks for gardenclub.homedepot.com and homedepot.com/gardenclub.)

Try to find the referring sites that look like blogs, then run a Google search for “Competitor Name” site:theblogname.com. You’ll be able to find when the blogger talked about the brand, what they said, and whether the brand/blogger relationship was a one-off mention or an on-going relationship.

You can run searches for Competitor -site:competitor.com to begin to find similar results. Again, look for the domains that look like blogs or editorial sites. You can get more advanced by including keywords with campaign types:

Brand -site:brand.com

Brand review -site:brand.com

Brand guide -site:brand.com

Brand sponsors -site:brand.com

Tip 1: As you go, keep track of all of the sites that could be an opportunity or fit for your brand in the future.

Tip 2: The BuzzStream List Navigator can save you a ton of time here. Watch the video.

Step Four: Analyze the Campaigns

As you review all of the internal content and external sites that mention the competitor, you should start to get an idea of what the competitor is prioritizing. Maybe they’re working on product reviews within a certain category, or maybe they’re trying to get in front of a specific audience.

Ask the following questions for each campaign:

What type of campaign is it? Sponsorship? Review?

Who are they targeting?

How are they positioning themselves?

What are their main messages and tagline?

Are there offline components to this campaign?

What behavior are they asking for? What are they ultimately selling?

Does it seem like they’re using a PR, Social, or SEO agency?

What is their goal with this campaign?

Why might that be their goal?

Does this campaign look natural or does it feel a little forced or spammy?

Step Five: Find Opportunities for Your Own Brand

Now that you have an idea of what your competitors are up to, you can begin to glean insight and ideas for your own brand.

Ask yourself the following about your own brand:

What strategies are my competitors missing?

Where does their messaging fall short?

Which audiences are they missing out on?

Why are they running these campaigns?

Has the business prioritized a category?

Are they after something like coupon use? Does that mean coupons convert well?

Are they getting links for the sake of links? Are they at risk for penalty?

What do bloggers generally expect from these campaigns?

How are my products or services different from what my competitors are promoting?

What can I offer to bloggers that my competitors can’t?

Going back to the Home Depot gardening example I mentioned earlier, my research helped me find that the company ran a blogger review campaign last year with the hashtag #DigIn. Rather than looking for links, though, it seems Home Depot was really after email signups. If I were a small, local garden center, I’d think about a few things. First, I should consider an email newsletter of my own. Second, it seems like the Home Depot missed out on local bloggers, so maybe they’re the ones I could go after.

Did we miss any key questions? What do you usually look for when doing competitor audits of your own? Leave a comment or tweet to us @BuzzStream.

P.S. Special thanks to our intern, Olivia Polger, for her help editing this post.